curatorial statement

BRENDA MELGOZA CIARDIELLO: ASCENDENCIA
 
es con paciencia que se hacen las tortillas de maiz
 
Ascendencia features monumental paintings, ceramic sculptures, photographic collages, cyanotypes, and multimedia assemblages by Fort Worth-based, Mexican interdisciplinary artist Brenda Melgoza Ciardiello. The artist investigates the multiplicity of her connections to place — Mexico and Texas, among others — addressing notions of displacement and continuing redefinition, a process which, like the adage about the making of corn tortillas, requires time and patience. Not simply an end goal, ascendencia is a personal and creative process. The term not only signifies upbringing and growth from roots but also divine ascension. 
 
Whether through layered source imagery from her familial archive, evocations of cherished objects, landscapes, and memories, through vessels that echo maternal, feminine, or plant forms, or through arrangements that evoke sanctuaries or altars, the works bear witness to Ciardiello’s own ascendencia, her reconstruction and reinterpretation of the self through memory and place and her longing to grow roots to bloom where she is planted.
 
Vessels are containers often used for transport, and as much as the artist’s work is about groundedness or rootedness, she also grapples with concepts of floating unmoored, being uprooted, and notions of the fleeting and temporary, of displacement and of migration, as well as experiences thriving in place. The feminine forms of these containers are part of the artist’s reflection of what it is to carry multiple places within oneself—how, in her own words, we are “constantly reshaped by the ongoing influence of personal landscapes encountered through movement, migration, and memory.”
 
Maggie Adler, Curator